Today, a guest post from Etelka, the blogger behind the hilarious Wretched Refuse blog, which you all should read every day.
***
Thanks for letting me sit in, David! As I was telling you, I recently did some rooting around in a unique cranny of pre-manosphere media: sexist vintage cartoons. In the late ’40s and ’50s there were a lot of them published in books like this. (Some of the book covers that follow have been borrowed from the Vintage Sleaze blog here.)
My investigations had a purpose: I was blogging about castration anxiety, and I thought I might find some old cartoons that had something to say about it. Not likely. The vast majority of these artworks have two themes: Young women are hot, and old women are dried-up and useless.
Often expressed in the same panel.
Some dramatize the existential terror that gnaws at the core of every PUA:
Others offer date-rape fantasies:
Still, I’ve always liked looking at these old cartoons. There’s something uniquely voyeuristic about them. After all, they were never meant to be glimpsed by women. These cartoons are as pure a conduit into the male id as the girlie mags of the period.
I find they elicit a surprising range of emotion. Some give you a smug sense of how far we’ve come…
…if not in attitudes, then in comedic chops.
Others provoke meditations on whether we’ve come that far at all — and where we’ve ended up. This one reminds me of a certain dicey scene involving a thumb in the movie Bring it On. (That being the dicey scene in which the guy cheerleader nonconsensually violates the girl cheerleader’s nether parts with said thumb.)
This cartoon invited men to snigger at the idea of uninvited vaginal probing; 50 years later, Bring it On invited teenage girls to do the same. Progress?
Feeling queasy yet? Gird yourself for a full-on dry heave with this one, previously featured on Manboobz:
Yep, it’s definitely the undiluted male id we’re talking about here. That’s why this next group of comics is so strange. They’re from this book:
Why is the guy looking behind the painting? To get a glimpse of her nipples? Ha ha… I suppose?
But that’s nothing to what’s inside. If sexist cartoons reveal the male id, then what are these revealing?
Ha ha! I guess!
Um… ha? No. No ha.
Uh…
Riiiiight.
These cartoons aren’t just unfunny, they’re downright surreal. They remind me of those Nancy or New Yorker caption contest parodies where people deliberately put in non sequitur captions. (You’ll notice that the front cover of the “French cartoons” book up there doesn’t make any sense either.) If I were a psychoanalytic literary critic, I’d wind this up with something about how repressed urges can explode into incoherent displays of hysteria. (The non-funny kind of hysteria, obvi!) Instead, let’s conclude with one more mystifying example, this one from “Satan!” magazine.
Where? WHERE? It’s a question to ponder.
Pass that likker, there, Argenti.
Once again, MRAs prove that they aren’t misogynists, because they don’t think men are superior to women, no, not at all:
and
and
and finally
That last one from roharareddit goes on a while longer. I can’t remember who zie is in real life, but zie is associated with AVfM.
There’s this kid (decades younger than myself) at my job. He doesn’t really look like Treyvon Martin but he has a similar baby face. Round cheeks, big eyes. Soft smile. For 21 years old, he really has his shit together – smart, one of the most intellectually curious people I’ve ever met, (even though his public school education hasn’t given him the vocabulary for the concepts which interest him), in a committed relationship with great communication, empathetic.
Just an amazing human being. He does have one bad habit, slouching. I wonder if part of that is because he’s 6’3″ but innately pacifistic. (Not shy or afraid to stand up for himself, just more comfortable with reasonable approaches to conflict.)
Ever since the Zimmerman case, I’ve been a bit worried about his slouching. How would it make a stranger see him? Could it be seen as threatening to some idiot? I know the whole thing is reactionary on my part because the Zimmerman trial is just one long rage-fest. But sometimes I see it and it makes me feel this small, strange, almost maternal, panic.
I dunno, it’s such a small thing and this whole post is barely related to the subject at hand. it’s just been really bothering me. This was the only space that felt safe enough to mention it. Thank you for that.
Oh, holy fuck.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/12/george-zimmerman-defense-trayvon-wasn-t-injured-except-for-the-gunshot.html
@Unimaginative
http://media-cache-ak1.pinimg.com/originals/66/d3/ce/66d3cec72dfdb9aaabed088dc017ff9d.jpg
Oh god no, I’m not reading Trayvon Martin threads. It’ll just blow out my carefully reassembled brain tubes.
RE: Kittehserf
Ah, but does he want you to gad about in a kilt? (Somehow I think Mac would be more the kilt-wearing type of the two of you.) 😉
Shockingly enough, the only kilt Mac has any interest in wearing is something pink. (And he refuses to wear pink because he thinks it looks awful with his coloring.) He’s more than willing to try and get ME into one, though.
And I still haven’t seen Highlander. I know nothing about it, except…
Re: CassandraSays
Well, to be fair, there can be only one.
Bad CassandraSays! No kitten!
““There is an interesting gender split on the issue. By a 54-34 margin, men say that the government has gone too far in restricting civil liberties. Women, on the other hand, say by a 47-36 margin that anti-terrorism efforts haven’t gone far enough.”
So! Assuming those splits are by gender not agree-disagree (I’ll get back to that)
Question 1: has the gov’n gone too far in restricting civil liberties?
Men: yes = 54, no (or no reply, which makes me think this isn’t how the split is done) = 46
Women: yes = 34, no = 66
Depending the margin of error, which the statistically allergic MRM didn’t give, the men work out to a pretty much equal split. Whereas women lean, relatively strongly, towards no.
Question 2: have the anti-terrorism efforts gone far enough?
Men: yes = 64, no = 36
Women: yes = 53, no = 47
So women split pretty evenly, men feel, fairly strongly, that they have gone far enough.
Now, what happens if the splits are agree-disagree and disagree-agree? They got asked totally different questions and I want to slap someone. Considering they add to under 100, I suspect this is what’s going on.
Ice cream example!
50% of men favor chocolate, 35% vanilla, 15% other
70% of women favor chocolate, 10% vanilla, 20% other
Proper form:
Is chocolate your favorite ice cream? Men/women 50/70 = 120
Statistical nightmare form:
Men favor chocolate over other 50/15
Women favor other over vanilla 20/10
(You could probably work out who said what since these aren’t totally unrelated)
So, what I think that quote says is that…men where asked about civil liberties and 54% think the gov’n has gone too far; women where asked about terrorism and 47% say the gov’n hasn’t done enough. Which is, um, a good way to hide what women said about civil liberties and what men said about terrorism.
Is there a citation on that claim? Probably not, citations are misandry.
Argenti, what is particularly amusing is that apparently the gender split went the other way during the Bush era.
Other option: The original question was something like “Do government anti-terrorism efforts go too far in restricting civil liberties, or have they not gone far enough?”
In which case I want to be near Argenti so I can physically restrain zir from mashing zir head against a wall.
41. What concerns you more about the government’s anti-terrorism policies, that they have gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties, or that they have not gone far enough to adequately protect the country?
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-and-centers/polling-institute/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=1919
There’s also a chart at the end, basically: “Do you think Snowden’s a traitor, or a whistleblower?”
…Motherfucker.
I didn’t want that to actually be the question.
When ever I get one of those bullshit phone polls I always end up introducing the pollster to the concept of “false dichotomy.”
Someone hand me a paper bag before I hyperventilate.
What is this shit!?! *flails*
No. Never. Why? Nooooo. Bad question! *slaps it* FALSE DICHOTOMY ALERT!!
No. No. No. Nope. Nope. No way.
Some one please fetch me the noptopus.
And it’s Quinnipeac! That’s…no, no, nope.
It’s one of the best non-Yale colleges in the area, had I been the listen to authority sort, I’d have gone there.
*runs screaming from the room*
Pseudo spreadsheet:
Option……………men……women
Gone too far……54………34
Not far enough…36………47
No answer………10………19
Conclusion given that HORRIBLE QUESTION? Women are better at going nope, no, not touching that; and are less divided between the two SHITTY OPTIONS (13% difference v 18%).
Men have stronger options, women go SHITTY QUESTION. I refuse to touch the bazillion other options // causes behind both sides of the SHITTY QUESTION (e.g. do women see the civil liberty restrictions as being unrelated to terrorism but rather about their uterī? Do men think anti-terrorism policies adequately protect the country, but need to be expanded abroad? Do women ink the wars are pointless, we should be doing more here? ARGH SO MANY OPTIONS!!)
BOTH!!! I think both!!
I’m in your survey, tearing about your methodology.
Called it. And here you go.
*picks up x-acto, waves it around* this is why we can’t have nice things!! *goes back to kirigami*
(What, you thought I was gonna stab the survey? Well…I guess I would sooner make paper airplanes or something than take it…)
*hands Argenti paper bag off likker*
That is an awful, overly complicated question. I haven’t done any work with making surveys, but I’d think you’d want to keep your questions simple so as to minimize the noise-to-signal ratio (to borrow a phrase).
I read in a paper the other day that Zimmerman’s defense was refuted by the prosecutors because of some DNA something or another, and that Zimmerman’s DNA was also found on the shirt underneath the sweatshirt which basically showed that there wasn’t any self-defense bullshit at play. Or something – my memory is a bit fuzzy on it, but it was something about how the defense was BS and the prosecutors had shown that pretty conclusively.
And I still haven’t gotten to the end of that Popehat thread. Being sick isn’t helping with my distractedness either. Seriously, who the fuck catches the flu in the middle of summer??
That comment cloudiah posted about Snowden reminded me why I don’t think I could ever date men even if I wanted to. You never know which ones think some version of that reductionist bullshit.
Argenti nailed the explanation of why those (non-)survey results came back as they did, anyway. I can personally refute the Redditor’s explanation as well by saying that, as a female human, I fear the state quite a bit and for good reason (see, Texas, for one thing).
Of course, I should also fear close male associates and family members (like husbands, boyfriends, dads, brothers) because they are statistically more likely to cause harm to women than are random strangers. But naturally the MRM either doesn’t know that, denies that, or has some patent explanation for how that’s really women’s fault for making men act violently.
“Seriously, who the fuck catches the flu in the middle of summer??”
People who don’t eat enough ice cream 😀
I take those polling point surveys regularly and no matter how many times I tell them how crappy their false dichotomy questions are in the “would you like to tell us how crappy our questions are” section they do not change.
Argenti, that’s the best explanation I have heard. I should go eat more ice cream!
@SittieKitty, I haven’t had summer flu, but I’ve had summer colds lots of times and they’re the pits. Long-distance-non-catching internet hugs!
@Argenti – I’m not sure I even want to know wtf Pillock was on about with the smoking comparison. I loathe smoking and would love to see it banned in public altogether, but I can’t for the life of me think what he was comparing it with. He’s a piece of work, ticking all the MRA boxes – racism, misogyny …
@LBT gad no, pink would definitely not be Mac’s colour!